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Cinematic Effects Aid Gaming Realism
rtt writes "When Valve recently added support for HDR technology into their 'Source' engine, they quickly discovered that in games such as Day of Defeat, a WW2 based game, the rendering quality far surpassed the video quality that would have been possible in the time that the game was set. In a new round of updates, VALVe have researched and developed cinematic effects commonly used by the film industry - motion blur, color correction, and depth of field amongst others - to aid realism for the set period of the game. bit-tech has up an article detailing each of the technologies, along with video clips to showcase the effects at work in the Day of Defeat mod."
I don't understand. HDR as an effect is good because it's similar to how our eyes work, but adding cinema effects from the time period of the game plot? That's sounds completely bizarre.
Soldiers in World War II didn't all have eyes with built-in film grain. Sounds like somebody is working in the wrong industry. Games should try to be games, not try to be films.
I hope this isn't taking away from them releasing maps beyond the four that came with the launch. After all, the primary criticism of DoD: Source is its lack of content, not graphical quality or immersiveness.
Here is neat technical write up (use the fish) on how HDR (and other things) were accomplished on the PS2 within Shadow of the Colossus./ 3dwa.htm
... especially when you don't notice it.
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20051207
It is really amazing technology
I applaud Valve's move. It seems a rather humorous artistic take on the modern "realism" period in games today. Taking a WWII shooter, a very common "reality" subject, and applying affects to it in a way that is unrealistic but at the same time much closer to the way its primary audience knows WWII as "real" (we only know the second great war through its grainy footage, and I doubt there are many WWII vets playing DoD.)
I for one love this artistic move by Valve. We have enough realistic games and WWII shooters and this satirical take on modern graphics is a welcome change.
Well done, Valve! Keep up the great work!
Demented But Determined.
I stopped reading after that.
A graphical updated version of a 4 year old mod (Beta 1 came out January 2001) is 'arguably the best multiplayer World War II shooter around'? Wth?
...lens flare!
What the fuck is the point of these effects in a multiplayer game? After ooing and ahing for 2 minutes everyones gona turn it off so it doesn't get in the way. Why dont they spend their time adding these to a SP game.
Soldiers in World War II didn't all have eyes with built-in film grain.... Games should try to be games, not try to be films.
The goal of games is not necessarily to simulate reality at all, just as the goal of painting, photography, and film is not necessarily to accurately show events as they occurred. There will always be non-realistic (i.e. stylized) depictions in any field of art, and that is not a bad thing at all.
Whether or not soldiers in WWII saw everything through film grain is irrelevant. All that matters is whether it enhances or diminishes the theme of the game. The more tools available to artists, the better.
I love how the mainstream game press loves to liken games and the game industry to their Hollywood counterparts. Naturally, "cinematic" 3D effects are being likened now to "realistic" effects (3dfx marketed this first with their "t-buffer" temporal motion blur nonsense).
This is not the journalist's problem; the corporate/marketing guys in the game industry who talk to the press are the ones who hail such things as "realistic" and "revolutionary", when in fact they are not anywhere near photorealitic and are in fact quite passe in the world of computer graphics (i.e. the technology is based off of a 10-year-old SIGGRAPH presentation). Of course, the only people who ever talk to the corporate whores are the technical staff at the game companies, and none of them really care enough to correct the suits; alternatively they just like getting free pats on the back for doing such excellent work and making "the impossible possible" from a suit's POV (when in reality they are simply engineering the probable, extrapolating the new from last year's technology).
To be fair, the story of the last decade in computer graphics has been the effort to get enough computing power to do something close to photorealism. It was quite accurate to say that more fillrate (for resolutions beyond 320x240) made games more realistic, bilinear/trilinear or anisotropic texture filtering made the scene more realistic, that antialiasing makes the scene more realistic (no jaggies in real life), advanced animation techniques that bring the entities in the world makes the scene more realistic, that HDR effects that partially blind you when you look at the sun are more realistic- but notice as time has gone on, the graphical effects implimented have more and more effect on actual gameplay. The more realistic the graphics, the more realism people will come to expect in the gameplay- this is being overlooked, and I think this is a reason why game industry is not living up to performance projections.
Not to mention the question: If the graphics are there to present and support the gameplay, must not the graphics be suited to do so? Are realistic/cinematic graphics really the best way to do so? Aren't we wagging the dog a bit here?
Performing sanity checks on your own beliefs is vital in avoiding poisoned koolaid.
The thing is that it's a flat screen already... so you are effectively 'watching' something that you are taking part in anyway... so you can't be truly immersed... so, what they're attempting to do is to make it more like what we're used to seeing on a flat screen, and that's movies... we have spent our lives seeing 'reality' presented via tv/movies in this way, so if you can make the game seem more like that, then you can make it seem like you're acting in a movie (in a sense anyway)...
There are ways and means to use this technology to make it seem more like you are really 'there' rather than making it film like, and that's the other way to try to take it... as much like looking into the real world as possible... but don't discount the filmic qualities as a way of immersion... it works very well too.
This reminds me of the one where Calvin asks why old movies are black & white, and his Dad says the whole world used to be black & white...
the current problem with Day of Defeat: Source is that the quality of the scenes rendered is far beyond what was capable in the time period where the game is set.
This whole idea is a conceptual nightmare. I guess games set in periods prior to the invention of film are going to need to have mods to transcribe them into series of still paintings, pencil sketches, or woodcuts or something. Let's have a game set in prehistoric times rendered entirely in cave art!